Thursday, March 21, 2013

With the GTC almost over, we can finally unveil what we've been working on for the past seven months. Brigade has made massive progress during that time in all areas: performance, quality, sampling efficiency and tremendously improved support for dynamic scenes and multi-GPU setups.

The level of realism in Brigade is just absurd and playing with it often feels like you're watching a real life movie.

We love playing GTA, so we set out to make a real-time path traced GTA like demo to be shown at Nvidia's GTC conference (and also next week at the GDC). The plan was to have hundreds of cars and pedestrians populating a living and breathing city, all path traced in real-time. A rather ambitious goal, since path tracing this kind of highly dynamic scenes in real-time was never done before, but do we love a challenge! After doing successful tests with hundreds of moving cars and characters in a city environment, we added physics, which slowed things down massively so we had to settle on just one car. Brigade was blowing our minds, time and time again, it renders monstrously fast.

The video below shows some of our tests rendered at 1280x72:

- the city scene has 750 instanced animated characters (30k triangles each, in total 22.5 million animated triangles), all of them physics driven with Bullet physics in a 600k triangle city

- the Piazza scene is fantastic to test color bleeding, there are 16384 instances of a 846k triangle city, 13.8 billion triangles in total, rendered in real-time

- interior scene from Octane Render, created by Enrico Cerica, 1 million triangles rendered in real-time

Friday, March 15, 2013

After the successful presentation at Siggraph 2012, Brigade will rear its ugly ahead again in public next week. This time it's Nvidia's GTC conference, where OTOY will have a 50 minute talk on Tuesday, showing off Brigade, Octane Render and LightStage. Make sure to be there if you want to see the scene below running in real-time:

It's going to simultaneously blow your mind and socks off your feet (I'm still not completely recovered from the breath taking beauty) and you will regret it for the rest of your life if you won't be there. However, in the unlikely case that you can't make it to the conference, do not despair, because I'll post tons of screenshots and videos when the event is over.

Monday, March 4, 2013

Not that many updates lately, during the last two months we've been working on a kick-ass Brigade tech demo that will be shown on a conference in the second half of this month. I'll post screenshots and videos posted after the event, but in the meantime we're still doing some smaller tests, such as this as animated character instance test. The video and screenshots are rendered with Brigade's superfast path tracing kernel (maxdepth 6) and show 12 instanced characters animated in real-time.

Update: Some teaser images of a new scene, rendered in real-time with very nice color bleeding and real-time post processing:

About Me

Passionate about real-time path tracing and photoreal rendering with GPU ray tracing. I'm currently leading the scientific visualisation team at the EPFL Blue Brain Project in Geneva. Before that, co-founder and project lead at MI New Zealand, project lead at the University of Auckland NZ, technical project manager on OctaneRender (from pre-v1.0 beta to v2.0), instigator and driving force behind the Brigade real-time path tracing in games project leading the creative and technical R&D vision (Feb 2012 - Oct 2013), photoreal 3D graphics developer and consultant, medical imaging/neuroradiology researcher. My tutorial series on GPU accelerated path tracing (with source code) can be found on GitHub.
For questions, email me at sam.lapere@live.be